I was born. When I was 23 I started telling jokes. Then I started going on television and doing films. That’s still what I am doing. The end.

Comedy just pokes at problems, rarely confronts them squarely. Drama is like a plate of meat and potatoes, comedy is rather the dessert, a bit like meringue.

A lot of critics object to what I do, but I got into comedy to make people laugh, and I’ve always worked hard.

A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

I absolutely want to have a career where you make’em laugh and make’em cry. It’s all theater.

I take my wife everywhere, but she keeps finding her way back.

I now have two different audiences. There’s the one that has been watching my action films for 20 years, and the American family audience. American jokes, less fighting.

Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives, and the public continues to swallow them up with great passion. That is because human beings need stories.

Nobody enjoys the ‚little show about nothing‘ humor more than me, but that is never the way I look at it.

I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.

If you tell a joke in the forest, but nobody laughs, was it a joke?

It is easier to stay out than get out.

I feel lucky that I can have people laugh solidly for a whole hour by just saying what I think and getting paid for it.

On TV the people can see it. On radio you’ve got to create it.

When I’m on stage, it’s really intense. My mind is going a million miles an hour, trying to remember my act, trying to say it all the right way. It’s funny how different it looks and how it’s happening. There are three Fellini circuses in my head, and outwardly it looks like I’m going to get a bagel.

I know I’m more on television, and I’m more recognisable than maybe even the players because they run and train, but I just stand there, and my face does all these funny things that everyone can see all the time.

Humor is mankind’s greatest blessing.

I’m screamingly funny, you know, I really am in the books. And that helps because I’m funnier than a lot of people, I think, and that’s appreciated by young people.

To change ones life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly.

It’s probably not an accident that the films that I care about happen to be about issues that matter to me, stories that I want to tell.

I used to rush home to see ‚Match Of The Day.‘ Whatever I was doing, I wouldn’t miss it.

I don’t watch television and I rarely go to the cinema, but I recently watched ‚The King’s Speech‘ on a flight. It was so beautiful and so simple.

Sometimes cameras and television are good to people and sometimes they aren’t. I don’t know if its the way you say it, or how you look.

I’ve done films where we don’t rehearse, and I’ve done films where we heavily rehearse. I like rehearsals.

When Rumsfeld gets up on television and says we have definitive intelligence that al Qaeda is working with Iraq, how is an ordinary citizen supposed to react? They won’t tell you the evidence, and when anyone asks, they say, ‚Well, you know: It’s secret.‘

SNL is a home. You’ve got all of your brothers and sisters there, and it’s a great time.

Brad will tell you. He puts a movie on, I’m asleep in 10 minutes. I have no patience. But the kids love action movies with comedy, Jackie Chan and all that.

I love that I can tell the truth and have people laugh at it.

It’s easy being a humorist when you’ve got the whole government working for you.

I hate the past – especially my own past.

I try to be funny and not ignorant.

It takes up enough of my time and interest just working on comedy. I just enjoy it and love doing it.

When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed. He said, ‚Look, here’s what happened.‘

I think television has had a vast, unbelievable impact on us.

I make fun of situations and try and find the humor in things, but it’s never at the expense of the other guy.

Everything is funny, as long as it’s happening to somebody else.

Only one in four jokes ever works, and I still can’t predict what people will laugh at.

Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spent the rest of the day putting the pieces together.

I don’t need therapy. I’m not going to see a therapist; comedy acts as my therapy. I put my problems out there. I talk about them. I talk about everything before anybody has a chance.

Comedy isn’t necessarily all dialogue. Think of Buster Keaton: the poker face and all this chaos going on all around him. Sometimes it’s a question of timing, of the proper rhythm.

I’m never gonna step away from stand-up. I can’t. That’s what got me where I am, and that’s also my muse. That’s how I stay level-headed. That’s what keeps me going.

I like to use the hard times in the past to motivate me today.

I’m well past the age where I’m acceptable. You get to a certain age and you are forbidden access. You’re not going to get the kind of coverage that you would like in music magazines, you’re not going to get played on radio and you’re not going to get played on television. I have to survive on word of mouth.

I started in action, and then I went to comedy school.

It is hard to read a newspaper or watch a television newscast without encountering someone who has come up with a new ‚solution‘ to society’s ‚problems.‘

I can get where some scientists would say comedians are crazy. What you have to understand: A lot of comedians are dealing with a dark passion. A lot of these are guys coming from a tumultuous life, including myself. Some people need outlets, a way to express yourself.

A lot of artists fail when they try to act, and they flop. So when I get into acting, it’s going to be to do it well, something good, something of quality. I want people to say, ‚Wow, that movie‘ – or that show or whatever – ‚turned out really well.‘

I do love the films I’ve done in the past. I work hard in my movies and my friends work hard and we’re trying to make people laugh and I’m very proud of that.

Crankiness is at the essence of all comedy. My wife and I were discussing the different types of cranky. There’s entertaining cranky, annoying cranky, angry cranky.

In general my children refuse to eat anything that hasn’t danced in television.

I’m very proud of the Rome episode of ‚No Reservations‘ because it violated all the conventional wisdom about making television. You’re never, ever supposed to do a food or travel show in black and white.

I learned from the guys before me – Bill Cosby, Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock, Richard Pryor, just to name a few. These are guys that let it all hang out. What they lived is what they took to the stage.

None of the films I’ve done was designed for a mass audience, except for ‚Indiana Jones.‘ Nobody in their right mind thought ‚American Graffiti‘ or ‚Star Wars‘ would work.

In the end, everything is a gag.

But I did ‚Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.‘ They made a cereal out of it, so once you’ve had a cereal, it doesn’t get much more surreal than that. Surreal cereal.

I’ve always had to conquer fear when I’m on stage. Basically, I was and still am a very shy person. It’s absolutely in conflict with what I do. But once I deliver the first joke I’m okay. It’s like I’m out there all by myself just delivering my lines to nobody in particular without ever trying to notice the audience in front of me.

As a comedian, I found this thing, this profession, that suits my mind and life force. To drop it to do something else? I just don’t get that.

The worst thing that happens to you may be the best thing for you if you don’t let it get the best of you.

I’m spending a year dead for tax reasons.

The Four Levels of Comedy: Make your friends laugh, Make strangers laugh, Get paid to make strangers laugh, and Make people talk like you because it’s so much fun.

I love making people laugh. And I love laughing.